Lydian International is a mineral exploration and development company with expertise and a proven track record in discovering and developing new gold projects in unfamiliar and frontier settings. The Company is currently focussed on developing its Amulsar gold discovery in southern Armenia. The Amulsar project was a new discovery made by Lydian in 2006 and currently hosts a global resource of 3.2M ounces after its resource update in January 2012. This resource update comprises a total of 1.7 million ounces gold in the indicated category and 0.6 million ounces gold in inferred category (using a 0.4g/t cut-off) from the contiguous Tigranes and Artavasdes areas and 0.5 million ounces gold in the indicated category and 0.4 million ounces inferred category from the Erato prospect which is located approximately 900 meters to the north of Tigranes-Artavasdes. The project remains open in all directions and is currently advancing towards Bankable Feasibility with full production due in the first half of 2014.
Lydian International’s Amulsar Gold Project should achieve 90% recoveries
There are a number of key characteristics that will decide if a gold discovery ever becomes a mine. Location, permitting, capital expenditure, grade, tonnage, overburden and dozens of other factors all come under scrutiny, but one of the crucial factors is always the metallurgy. Why? Simply put, the way in which you extract the mineral from the source material has a knock on effect on the wider economics of the project. This is why mining exploration companies’ place quite a bit of emphasis on metallurgical test-work results. You can find a large gold deposit, but if the ore requires intensive, complex processing, it can still sink. On the flip side, small, low-grade or even remote deposits can still generate serious cash-flow if the metallurgy is simple, requiring minimal processing.
Lydian International’s Amulsar Gold Project certainly isn’t small; it already hosts an inferred resource of 1.4 million ounces, and with another 16,000 meters of drilling planned in 2010, this number is going to increase. But the deposit is a relatively low grade, bulk tonnage type deposit. Hence the delight in Lydian’s statement this morning that additional metallurgical test work at Amulsar has continued to show that the ore is amenable to low cost heap leaching, with tests showing that 90% recoveries are very achievable.
Three different column leach tests on 19mm ore composites returned gold extractions of 81.5%, 78.7% and 66.5% over a 14 day leach period and 89.1%, 88.6% and 76.5% over a 70 day leach period. “With recovery trajectories indicating gold was still being extracted in all composites with two of them likely to exceed 90% extractions after a short period of further leaching,” Lydian noted. The head assay grades of the three composites were 1.17 g/t gold, 1.09 g/t gold and 1.52 g/t gold.
The recovery grades reported for the column leach tests were based on the back-calculated head assays to ensure that they are the most conservative values, Lydian added.
“We are pleased with these results which imply recoveries of around 90% and a low-cost gold leaching operation at Amulsar”, said Tim Coughlin, Lydian’s President and CEO. “Cheap processing is of course very important for bulk tonnage operations. Further column leach experimental work will be completed this year to test different parts of the expanding resource and to test recoveries from newly identified prospect areas such as Erato where we drilled 229m at 1g/t gold in the last hole of the 2009 drilling season. The next stage will be to simulate a run-of-mine leaching operation which does not require crushing and can amount to cost savings in the order of 20%.”.
Amulsar sits within the Tethyan fold belt, one of the principal geological features in the northern hemisphere. Extending from Central Europe and northern Africa across Turkey and the Middle East to the Himalayas and then on to the Far East and Indonesia, it marks the point where Africa, Arabia and India collided with the Eurasian plate on their drift northwards and closed up the Tethys Ocean that lay between them in Triassic times.
Stretching as it does across so many countries and cultures, many of which have been centres of political and geological upheaval over the centuries, the Tethyan belt is perhaps the least explored of all the earth’s major geological systems.
Lydian has already secured a 25-year Special Mining License and all the necessary permits to build a starter pit at Amulsar, and is planning to complete additional components required for a feasibility study this year.
Production is expected to commence in 2013.
